Restoring Pride

An extended opinion piece - in the form of a verbose rant, and utterly lacking any pretense at genuine scholarship - attempting to establish pride as the greatest personal value, source of motivation, foundation for manners, and basis for happiness. The reason pride is superior to any other emotion (or other motivations and value systems) is … Because the author says so. There is more useful information to be had by looking up the definitions of pride, hubris, vanity, arrogance, and narcissism. For manners, you’re also better off looking it up online, and I found nothing of value in the section on happiness. The entire thing reminds me of Maslow's hammer (“if all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail”).If, on average, between the price of this book (money takes work, which consumes time) and the time spent reading, 8 hours are wasted… Worldwide, the average lifespan is around 72 years. 8 hours is about 1/1,892,160th of the average life. Or, if 2 million (hah!) people read this book, it’d be the equivalent (so far as potential contributions to civilization, science, and the progress of technology are concerned) of murdering at least one person. Of the hundreds of books I’ve owned*, this is the first that was thrown out as soon as I finished reading it - it’d be painful knowing it was left around where someone else might waste their time on it someday.*And thousands read; could hardly destroy the one utterly vile library series I managed to pick up. This book actually looks pretty good in comparison... Still only giving it one star, though.

This book is powerful. If you're seeking personal excellence and high achievement in life, it's worth reading.If you're one of those people who takes every opportunity to parade their "altruistic" perspective that, "Everyone is equal! We're all amazing in God's eyes! No one is worth more than anyone else!" and consider a bum smoking crack and pissing himself on the sidewalk to be of equal value to men or women of disciplined effort who achieve highly and contribute to the advancement of society, then this book isn't for you and you'd probably be frustrated by it.If you don't want to pay an inflated rate for one of the used copies listed here, go to worldcat(dot)org (a huge library database) and search for it. They may have it near you—I found a copy within 30 miles.Good luck on all of your current and future endeavors.

This man is probably insane.

It was interesting to learn how the word was misused by a historical group of people. This was of particular value for explaining the true meaning to students who think pride is the opposite of the original definition.